


The Taste of Hopes in My Mouth

by last_illusions (injured_eternity)



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-12
Updated: 2011-07-12
Packaged: 2017-10-21 08:28:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/223120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/injured_eternity/pseuds/last_illusions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Silence lends to the voices of ghosts, and some of us have more than others. Introspectively angsty Hotch & JJ, post-“Hanley Waters”, with a cameo from Rossi via text; gen, but can be read as het.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Taste of Hopes in My Mouth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scrollgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrollgirl/gifts).



> Spoilers: the series as a whole; specifically, 3x01 [“Doubt”], the George Foyet/Reaper arc [4x25; 5x01; 5x09], 6x02 [“JJ”], the Ian Doyle arc of 6x13-18 [“The Thirteenth Step” - “Lauren”], 6x20 [“Hanley Waters”]; hints at casting spoilers for season seven
> 
> Written for the help_japan auction on Dreamwidth. Title from Vienna Teng's "Drought", and huge thanks my fabulous Sadi for the cheerleading.

They say it’s the spouses of law enforcement, of the military, who come to dread the sound of the doorbell and the ringing phone. It’s the spouses who don’t realise they haven’t taken a deep breath the entire time their partner’s been gone—not until he or she walks back through the door. It’s the spouses who expect conversations with uniformed strangers to begin with “I’m sorry”. It’s the spouses who learn to nod in acceptance at the “I can’t tell you”, and it’s the spouses who wait to learn those secrets have killed.

What they don’t say is that it’s the partners, the team members, the co-workers who read death in one another’s faces. It’s the partners who pray against the day they have to watch a friend bleed out in the street or get blown to pieces. It’s the team that turns grief into anger and drive in a desperate quest for vengeance. It’s the friends acquired in fire who understand the secrets that can kill, and it’s the friends who grit their teeth and bite back tears when they open a conversation with a civilian stranger with “I’m sorry”.

Not all teams are so closely knit, but those who find them are lucky. Not all teams are so closely knit, perhaps because the wounds of loss cut deeper and bleed longer.

\-----

Standing in the doorway, silent as any sentinel, he watches his son sleep. One shoulder presses up against the doorjamb, the edge of the painted wood digging harshly into his arm. It grounds him, but it’s not enough to barricade against the words running through his mind like film reels, stark and black-and-white and holding far too much truth.

There’s a certain element of peace in those who rest, and there falls the counterpoint to his self-imposed litany: Jack, curled up with a stuffed dinosaur as big as he is (a gift from Reid), one small arm sprawled across bright covers muted by the dark. (He has been a quiet sleeper since infancy—always, except for the weeks after Haley died, when he woke screaming for his mother and could not understand why she never answered. The innocence of children is not always a blessing, not when you’re left to explain mortality and death and watch the confusion that follows, breaking your heart.) His breathing is barely audible, but in the light filtering in from the den his father can make out the reassuring rise and fall of his chest. There is solace, calm to be found in the explicit reminder that of all he has lost this year, this lifetime, his son isn’t among the casualties.

 _I know you blame yourself, and you shouldn’t_.

The words flit unbidden through his mind, the ghostly brush of butterfly wings. They’ve done so for hours, but still he flinches involuntarily, fooled into believing for a moment that someone spoke them aloud.

 _Everyone who tried to save him that day isn’t going to forget. It’s the day they failed. They’ll ask themselves what they could have done, could they have gotten here sooner. They’ll heal, but it’s going to take time. They’ll move on, but they won’t forget_.

They’re his own words, and his subconscious takes that as licence to play with them, substituting male pronouns for female, Damien’s name for Emily’s. They run together like a song stuck in his head—one for which he doesn’t know all the lyrics.

“You grieve privately,” Dave had told him yesterday. It was a reminder, rather than a new discovery, but even so he’d almost laughed aloud at the ridiculous understatement.

As if David Rossi had not spent long weeks knocking at Aaron’s door when George Foyet came and went as easily as if it were his name on the marriage certificates and deeds. As if the agent had somehow missed the roiling grief lurking behind his friend’s eyes and not drawn it out like poison before Aaron did something incredibly, irreversibly stupid. As if Dave hadn’t locked himself away after his divorce (divorces, really), harsh and bitter and angry until Aaron finally picked the lock on his front door. As if Aaron hadn’t walked in with a bottle of bourbon in hand and stubborn resolution in his eyes to talk him down, until he could see straight again even if he didn’t remember how he’d gotten there or what had been said.

And yet, despite all their tortuous history, the “I’m fine” came too easily, an automatic lie that sat on the tip of his tongue, a chambered bullet ready and waiting for the press of the trigger. It’s too habitual of late, and not just for him; and if it’s because the list of reasons why none of them are fine is too long for casual conversation, they all look away and pretend they don’t notice the skittering gazes and guarded tones.

With a sigh, he pushes himself away from the doorframe, ignoring the exorbitant amount of effort that requires. He leans in to pull the door mostly shut, and Jack shifts in his sleep. For a moment, Aaron freezes like a Polaroid, hand hovering in midair, but when his son settles again he lets the motion continue, tugging the door toward him until its edges rest against the frame.

He heads for the living room and his desk, where folders lie scattered and open with a military precision to their chaos, the pale cream of the manila stark against the mahogany grain. Grief assessments. It’s a term he despises—has since he was the rookie on the SWAT team with three months under his belt and one of their members lying in a drawer in the morgue. It’s a term designed by bureaucrats and politicians and administrations who believe that grief is the same for everyone, as though it follows set patterns and timelines, passing through the stages with the regularity of mile markers on a highway (Derek’s bitter diatribe comes to mind). He’s their Unit Chief, and he’d have cut off his own hand before letting Strauss conduct the assessments, but that doesn’t in any way mean he enjoys the task.

His mobile buzzes at him as he sits down: Dave. _If one more person covers his partner with his gun I’ll shoot the television_.

Aaron laughs aloud, surprising himself; it sounds unnecessarily loud in the silence of the apartment, and he pauses a moment, listening to see if he’s woken Jack. _No you won’t_ , he finally texts in reply. _Then you’d have to replace the television. And account for the bullet_.

The answer comes as quickly as if the agent had been sitting on his phone: _I never said I’d be using my service-issue_.

Shaking his head in wry, affectionate amusement, Aaron clears the text off his screen, not justifying it with a response—he knows better. Dave had spent a good portion of the weeks after Aaron’s discharge from hospital literally living on the younger agent’s sofa; protests had fallen on deaf ears. In the evenings that followed, he’d learnt his former mentor had acquired the habit of leaving the television running as he read through casefiles. When the inevitable police procedural succeeded the nightly news, he would invariably begin pointing out each mistake—thoroughly exasperated, irritation directly proportional to the egregiousness of the transgression—as though he’d forgotten the remote still had batteries. Aaron had derived more than his share of amusement at his friend’s expense, wordlessly grateful for a reason to laugh no matter how it pulled at the stitches. Since then, Dave had taken to issuing his complaints via text when they were out of the office; though he’d never say so aloud, Aaron has the sneaking suspicion it had begun mostly to ensure he was still alive.

 _I’m more married to this team than I ever was to three ex-wives_.

There’s a moment of vague speculation as he absently rolls a pen in his hands: the team dynamics become all manner of skewed under that description, and Aaron’s not entirely certain how his role is defined. He’s not entirely certain he wants to know, either.

Then it transforms into the uncomfortable realisation that the sentiment might well apply to him (yet another reason to hate these assessments: the introspection they provoke). In the months before his family had been swept away by the auspices of witness protection, he and Haley had reached a sort of uneasy truce, but the last year of their marriage had been fraught with tension and fury and bitterness, and something too close to helplessness. It had been a sharp contrast to the lightness and affection of their early relationship, so sharp it was physically painful. He’d retreated further into his job in an attempt to avoid the day it all combusted, and for all his brilliant profiling he’d vehemently refused to acknowledge the possibility that his plan would backfire. Perhaps that, then, was why Gideon’s leaving had felt like the symbolic workplace counterpoint to his vanishing personal life: a different divorce, the kind that came without lawyers.

As soon as the thought comes he shakes his head—he’s going utterly mental, he really is—and pulls a folder closer. Dave’s, he notes with no small amount of irony, but, as it has been the past four nights, he gets nowhere while at home. The office lends to an automatic efficiency that lets him work as though he follows directives in a script; the silence of his home, broken only by the low hum of the refrigerator, lends to the voices of ghosts, and these days he hears Emily. The agent he failed. The _friend_ he failed. Perhaps that is why he can’t bring himself to ignore her.

 _Just because you were the last one there doesn’t mean you could affect the outcome_.

He’d swear the voice is mocking him, for all that it’s his.

The sincerity in saying it to Derek makes him a hypocrite, a fact of which he’s more than well aware. He’s slept uneasily since Doyle began his hunt, wondering against his will if five more seconds could have caught him, could have kept her with them. Logically, he knows changing any of their positions during the breach would have had little impact on the outcome, because a man like Doyle did not enter a situation without an escape plan. Acknowledging that in the light of day, however, is another matter entirely, when he wonders if, by choking back the reassurances—“she’s alive”, he could tell them, in the privacy of a conference room or even his apartment—he’s betraying her or them or both in equal measures.

The knock on his door comes short and sharp and quieter than he would expect, startling him from his saturnine thoughts. Despite the alarm system, despite newly implemented building security and long months between him and Foyet’s attack, instinct prevails; his hand is on his gun before conscious thought registers, slipping under his pullover to flick open the holster in less time than it takes to blink.

“Hotch?”

For a fraction of a second, he breathes easier as he releases his grip, feeling foolish as a child jumping at shadows, but the respite is brief as he begins then to wonder what Jennifer Jareau is doing at his door two hours to midnight. He pauses long enough to glance through the peephole and ensure she’s not accompanied by thugs with pistols pressed to her ribs (in which case he would need a distinctly better plan than simply opening the door and offering himself up for dead) before he throws back the deadbolt and pulls the door open.

“JJ? Is something wrong?”

He’s trying for mild concern, but he must have lost the “mild” somewhere along the way, because she nods and holds up a hand.

“Everything’s fine,” she tells him.

There are shadows lurking beneath her eyes and lines of exhaustion pressed around her mouth that belie her words, but he chooses not to call her on it. Though she may work for him no longer, there’s a certain amount of latitude they allow one another, a holdover from “we don’t profile each other” that they can’t quite ignore. The change is too recent for that.

“Come in,” he invites, stepping back, but she hesitates like she’s thinking of protesting, weight shifted defencively onto the balls of her feet.

“Jack?”

“He’s asleep,” he answers, tipping his head toward the living room in a silent reaffirmation of the invitation.

Still she pauses, but this one lasts only a moment before she nods and slips past him. Pushing the door closed, he turns the lock and sets the chain, silently grateful this isn’t one of the nights he’d returned home late enough that Jessica had given up and taken the guest room. It doesn’t happen often—he refuses to let it, not when there remains the lingering worry that Jack will disappear the moment he turns his back—but the conversation he’s almost certain JJ’s there to have cannot afford a third party.

He turns to face her, expecting her to have taken a seat, or even moved at all; instead she’s barely a step away from him, bag still slung over her shoulder and posture wound tight with the wariness and braced apology that come with being the bearer of bad news. He’s seen it too often in the field to misread it, and he swallows against the instinctual fear that she is in fact there to tell him someone else is dead.

“JJ,” he begins, but she cuts him off like she doesn’t even realise he’s speaking.

“I’m sorry.” The words come like a riptide, too fast for a woman whose entire job rests on her ability to maintain grace under journalistic and literal fire. “I wanted to get here sooner, I’m so sorry, but I got called back to State the moment I landed and—”

“Hey, JJ, it’s okay,” he interrupts. There’s an uneasiness settling low in his stomach that leaves him certain of no such thing, but she seems to have forgotten how to breathe between words. “Take a breath.” Hands on her shoulders, he guides her subtly toward the sofas. “Sit down,” he advises, tone the slow, measured one he uses to settle a skittish horse. “Can I get you anything? Water, coffee, Jack Daniels…?”

She responds to the jest with a somewhat sheepish smile, though it does nothing to dispel the exhaustion from her features. It’s then that he realises she’s been running on nothing but fumes for at least a day—they’ve all had that look. Well hidden though it is in the smooth business sophistication of her suit, the fall of her curls, the subtlety of her makeup, the wear is in the details, the tiny smudge of mascara at the corner of one eye, the lines pressed into her feet around the edges of her shoes.

“I’ve had enough water to form a decent lake, and any more coffee will land me in the ER with caffeine poisoning.” There’s a rueful twist to her lips, but at least her words are easier now, laced with less desperation even if the cushions of the couch seem to swallow her.

“Figure out what you came to tell me,” he suggests, then adds over his shoulder as he ducks into the kitchen, “I’ll be right back.”

Snagging two bottles of root beer from his refrigerator (the good kind, made of vanilla and sassafras and wintergreen), he prises the tops off with a routine efficiency and walks back to sit beside her, holding one out like a peace offering. For a long moment, she simply stares bemusedly, as though she doesn’t entirely comprehend what she’s seeing. Then she breaks into a soft, disbelieving laugh, the strain bleeding from her posture, and accepts.

“I haven’t had this in years,” she says, tone roughly two parts reflective and one part wistful as she leans back. Without the tension bracing her, it’s like gravity is one thing too much to hold up against. “My team would sit around after practise on weekends drinking this—none of us dared drink beer in case we got caught, so this was our compromise.”

She had told him as much years ago, on a plane ride back from a case with too many victims and too few answers that had left them both unable to sleep. It had stuck inexplicably in his mind, and though it’s coincidence that it’s a favourite of Jack’s, tonight it’s also a convenient substitute for liquor and coffee, and their lives lack convenience the way drowning men lack oxygen.

“The sugar, at least, should keep you going until you get off the road,” he says, a sort of backward explanation as he tips the bottle toward her in a mock toast.

After a moment, she nods. “Thanks.”

When it becomes clear she’s searching for a starting point without success, he finally prompts, “So what is it you were trying to tell me?”

Again, that nod, somewhere between thanks and an abbreviated bow; then, “Right. I’m sorry,” she repeats. “I got back from Paris Friday afternoon. I had planned to come see you then, but my boss ordered me in the minute I got back on the ground. We’ve been working around the clock since.”

He raises an eyebrow at her. “There’s been a weekend in there,” he points out, deliberately dry, and her answering look is filled with so much “no shit, Sherlock” they could almost be back in his office arguing over which case to accept.

“Since when has that ever stopped _you_?” she shoots back, sounding for a moment like her old self, and he holds up both hands, conceding the point.

“Touché.”

Chuckling, she takes a sip of her drink, “I told you so” running silently between them. Then she sobers, running a hand through her hair. “I really am sorry,” she says yet again. “I didn’t mean to leave you hanging, I just… this wasn’t something for a phone conversation.”

“I know,” he responds, “it’s okay. You have nothing to be sorry for.” Hesitation, then: he knows he shouldn’t ask, but he can’t convince himself not to. “Is she okay?”

A beat, in which she says nothing; finally, she nods, though she won’t meet his eye. “Emily…” She pauses, taking a steadying breath like it hurts her to say her friend’s name. It probably does. “Em’s good at becoming a ghost. She has passports and ID and enough money to keep her off the grid; she won’t be found until she wants to be.”

A fact he knows all too well: she’d been deft as a magician at deflection and misdirection, even as a teenager, and he’d watched Elizabeth Prentiss’ people scramble to find her daughter without success. More than once, he’d been the one to bring her home, and though she’d hated him for it, it had become something of a game between them. It had made her turning up in his office of her own volition so many years later that much more surprising.

“She turned down WitSec?”

“It was never offered.” There comes a flash of indignation at the implication his people aren’t worth witness protection, and it must show in his face, because she hastens to add, “There was no time—they switched ambulances en route to the hospital, and we got her on the first private plane we could.” The details they hadn’t had time for that night, standing in the waiting room surrounded by so much grief it was suffocating. “I left her with a burn phone and told her where to meet me. A doctor patched her up, and two of the guys from my team at State saw her to Paris. She left as soon as we were done.”

“Thank you.” _For doing what I couldn’t_.

At that she does look up at him, eyes gently reproachful. “She was my friend too, Hotch.” Then her expression turns wry. “I probably would have done it even if they wanted her brought in, the hell with my job.”

“I know.” _I’m sorry_. It’s been said too many times tonight, but that makes it no less true. “Can you find her?” Another question he shouldn’t ask.

Her gaze lands on his and bounces away (there is a brief, absurd flash of Pong), but he sees the answer there long before she says it, and his heart thuds into his stomach. “No,” she says, apologetically, bitterly. “She said it would be safer that way.” She takes a pull of her drink with what appears to be all the anger she harbours toward Doyle; if the way she blinks is any indication, the carbonation burns on its way down. “She’ll come back one day,” she continues with near desperate conviction. “I know her, and she’ll be keeping tabs on us. Garcia will be able to find her, post something she’ll see.”

He nods: the person Penelope Garcia cannot find does not exist, dead or alive. Given enough time, she’s worse than the most tenacious bloodhound, capable of hunting you down in the dankest, darkest, hole-in-the-ground desert cave; convinced though he is of Emily Prentiss’ ability, he’s not sure even she can evade that level of skilled determination.

“I’ll get her back, JJ. She is _not_ going to have to run forever.”

It’s a promise. Doyle is not invincible, and there’s not an agency in the country that wouldn’t answer if they called to find him. The instinctual loyalty within law enforcement, regardless of political demarcations, sparked by the loss of an agent is a pyrrhic victory at best, too hard-won to remotely merit celebrating, but it’s an increase in manpower not otherwise available. It had been Emily who once observed that their job was a double-edged sword, sometime in the middle of the night on one overly long surveillance operation. He can’t help but wonder how long she’d been waiting for her past to sink its teeth into her heels.

JJ chuckles, low and sad in her throat. “If anyone can, Hotch, it’s you.”

He just watches her for a moment, seeing the fatigue that colours the lines of her posture. There’s no fight left in her after the week she’s had, and he refuses to consider what she’ll look like if her boss calls her in tonight. But there’s a set resolve to her shoulders that she never seems to lose—she might not be the most physically imposing presence, but she’s immeasurable distances from fragile. No one makes the mistake of assuming otherwise twice. Though she’s acquired a world-weariness she hadn’t had before leaving the BAU (he wonders what she’s had to see at State), it’s the sobriety of experience, of exposure, not the loss of heart.

“How are you holding up?” he finds himself asking before he’s fully catalogued the risk in the question. He’s required to ask it of his team, as if he would otherwise not care, and though she’s no longer on Bureau payroll, she’s still decidedly _his_ team, politics bedamned.

She quirks an eyebrow at him in response, gaze politely sceptical. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” she quips, and he smiles reflexively; he deserved that. She’s gotten a bit bolder since she left, their playing field almost wholly levelled by the technical dissolution of rank, though at times like these he almost regrets it.

“Fair enough,” he says aloud, then waits, making it clear he expects her to go first. Because rank is a ghost between them not entirely dissipated, she grudgingly concedes.

“Better than I could be,” she offers just a touch wryly, toying with the edge of the label on her bottle. “I keep dialling her number—I get halfway before I realise I can’t anymore, and then I wonder what I missed, what we did wrong.” Glancing up, she shrugs one shoulder, blue eyes sad before she looks away again. “More than anything I want to tell the others—it wouldn’t put her back on the team, but it might hurt them less than believing she’s dead.” She holds up a hand, as though staying a protest he wasn’t going to provide. “It’s operationally stupid, I know, but… it doesn’t make me feel any less like a traitor. There are officially six people who know she’s even alive. Only two of them know who she is, and I can’t change that unless I trip over Doyle and put a bullet between his eyes.”

Then she looks back at him, challenging. “You?”

Wisely, he opts not to comment on the uncharacteristic violence; it’s hardly unwarranted, and he can’t afford to be any more of a hypocrite. Not today, at least.

“Mostly the same place you are,” he admits. “Angry. Wondering what we could have done differently.” He gives up on the drink, setting it on the coffee table; all it’s providing him is an excuse to choke. “Every time the team is together I think how easy it would be to lock the door and tell them the truth. Except—”

And he freezes, latching on to something she’d just said. “You said—” He pauses again, doing some rapid mental math. “You said six people know she’s alive. You. The EMT.” He ticks them off on his fingers, watching her carefully as a hawk. “The doctor. Your two agents. Who else? Pilot?”

She shoots him a look that says “you’re not getting out of this that easily” as clearly as if she said it aloud, but she answers anyway. “No, one of the agents served as pilot. My boss. Officially, you were never told.”

Ignoring that last (he’s served on enough diplomatic security attachés to be fully cognizant of the logistics, and he’s past the point of being offended by politics he can’t change), he meets her eyes squarely. “Her mother doesn’t know.” It’s a statement, not a question, and he sees the moment it dawns on her, like light breaking on the horizon that turns out to be the apocalypse in place of the sunrise.

“No. She…” Elizabeth Prentiss hadn’t even made the funeral, had been utterly unreachable the week everything fell to irreparable pieces. “She called my boss when she found out Emily was dead, but…” She falls back against the cushions, breath whooshing out of her. “Oh man.”

Elbows on his knees, he drops his head into his hands, rubbing his temples against the budding migraine he feels lurking. “When Emily gets back,” he says without looking up, “you and I need to grab your boss and take her place.”

Her breath catches in her throat, and by the time she can breathe again, she’s laughing instead, face hidden in her hand at the utter absurdity. After the stifling sorrow of the past week, it’s contagious, and the laughter bubbles up in Aaron’s throat before spilling over. Ambassador Prentiss is a formidable woman—it’s not hard to see where Emily gets some of it—and for all her rationality, her inevitable fury at not being briefed on her daughter will be cataclysmic. It’s unlikely she’ll recognise the tactical benefit until long after she’s through having people systematically fired.

“We’re dead.” She’s still laughing, cheerfully matter-of-fact, and he can’t help agreeing.

“In all likelihood.”

The grin she shoots him is just a touch reckless, the kind of grin that comes when you haven’t had something worth laughing about in too long. “Excellent,” she replies decisively, holding her bottle out toward him. He grins in response and swipes his off the table to clink the bases together.

He takes a sip and draws in a long breath, then does some abrupt mental gymnastics and swings to his feet, slipping down the hall to check on Jack. But their sudden levity hasn’t woken his son, who’s burrowed into the fur of the dinosaur. For a moment, Aaron thinks it’s Jack who possesses the best coping mechanisms.

Pulling the door back towards himself, he returns to the living room to find JJ standing by the window, shoulder braced against the wall and body angled to face the moon over the city. “We miss you,” he offers as he walks up, mirroring her position on the other side of the window. An echo of the same sentiment he’d given her years ago (or so it seemed) during her brief return from maternity leave, he wishes her return this time were as certain.

Some of the mirth spins out of the room, abrogated by a whirlwind of mingled regret and disappointment, and her answering smile is soft and sad and just the slightest bit wry. “I miss you guys, too.” She shifts so she can face him, wrapping her arms around herself. “It wasn’t right, being there without her,” she continues, and despite her apparent moratorium on specific nouns, he understands her perfectly. “And yet it still felt more like… like _home_ than State ever has.”

Nodding, he reaches between them to lay a hand on her forearm, silent understanding of all the things none of them ever speak aloud. They had, in some ways, gotten closer after she left, when the only times they ever saw one another was the odd occasion he dropped Jack off with Will and Henry. He’s still fighting doggedly with the brass to get her back; she’s still fighting doggedly with the brass to get _sent_ back; and they get in touch now and again, even if only to say they’re not getting anywhere. An exercise in futility, perhaps, but one borne of hope and a desperation to hold a family together.

She drops a hand over his, squeezes back in wordless thanks for just a moment before they both draw back. “Sometimes I think I’m crazy,” she admits, dry and self-deprecating. “I get one incredible promotion, and yet all I can do is try everything I know to get back.”

Not entirely certain how to justify that with an answer—not really—but unable to ignore it entirely, he settles instead for something a hairsbreadth away from serious. They taught deflection in law school and again in interrogation, and there isn’t an instructor in his past who’d ever have said he wasn’t unusually skilled; what they usually fail to explain is that it isn’t necessarily a talent.

“Then I must be an awful friend for trying to drag you back instead of shoving you out the door,” he says finally, perfectly expressionless; her answering laugh isn’t quite a laugh, too sharp and too raw.

“It’s been a ridiculous year,” she tells him with a sigh, looking up to meet his eye.

“We’ll get through it,” he answers, as he had to Dave the day before, but the same postscript flits through his mind, foreboding as any premonition: how badly will they have to pay to survive?

But he gives voice to none of that, choking it back to settle somewhere deep in his chest, where he can pretend to ignore the hollow feeling left in the wake of the year’s tally of absences. “We always have,” he adds, though they both know that doesn’t mean “we always will,” regardless of how much they wish it did.

She nods, and then her gaze is suddenly assessing, calculating. “Losing her wasn’t _your_ fault, you know.” She says it prosaically, the same way she’d say, “the food is good” to a dinner partner. “She left here knowing we went after her until we couldn’t anymore.”

In spite of himself, he smiles; her surprise is reflexive, visible in the lines of her face and shift of her eyebrows, and he can hardly blame her. “I said the same thing this afternoon in the field,” he explains as the comprehension dawns on her. “Believing it is, unfortunately, a separate matter.”

She nods in silent agreement, the sort that comes from someone who’s fought in the same trenches with you, and he shoots her a sidelong glance. Though his tone is even, his eyes are teasing as he says, “I told you you’d have made a good profiler.”

Mid-inhale, she laughs, chokes, and doubles over trying to regain her breath. Even though the medical advice to clap choking victims on the back is now defunct, he does it anyway; she waves him off, and when she straightens her lashes are damp and she’s still chuckling.

“I got more than enough of that from the rest of you, no need to get the official label myself,” she informs him, blue eyes amused. “And really, Hotch, if you wanted to kill me there are easier ways.”

Huffing out a laugh of his own, he shakes his head. “Too obvious.”

“You would think so.” Her tone is dry, affectionately exasperated. Then she glances over his shoulder and catches sight of the clock on the DVR. “Damn, I should be heading home.”

Nodding, he pushes himself away from the wall. “Are you all right to drive?”

Again, she waves that away. “I’ll be fine. We’ve driven in worse conditions.” She raps her knuckles against the wooden frame of the window, face perfectly straight.

He knows she knows he doesn’t believe in superstition, but still he informs her, “The interior wood is fake,” because of course he of all people would have double-paned fibreglass and vinyl frames in an apartment.

Rolling her eyes, she throws up her hands and walks back to the coffee table, snagging her bag from the floor and the bottle from the table. She detours into the kitchen to deposit it in the sink before he can stop her, then meets him at the door.

“Are you still planning to drop Jack off tomorrow?”

Nodding, he tips his head to the side with a questioning look. “If that’s all right?”

She just smiles, more in the crinkling of the corners of her eyes than in the curve of her lips. “Of course. Will and Henry love the company.”

“Then I’ll see you at seven-thirty.”

It’s her turn to nod, but as he’s pulling the door open, she says, “Hotch.” He looks over his shoulder, waiting. “I really am sorry.”

Turning to face her completely, he lets go of the door and drops both hands onto her shoulders. “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he reminds her for the second time that night, this time with far more certainty than the last. “Don’t take this all on yourself—you did everything right.”

She quirks an eyebrow at him, her scepticism apparent, but all she says in response is, “Only if you take your own advice.”

He tightens his grip on her shoulders for a fraction of a second, then steps back to let her pass. “We’re all working on that.”

“I know.” Pausing in the threshold, she adds, “Thank you,” waving vaguely in the direction of the apartment, at him, and he shakes his head firmly.

“Thank _you_ ,” he corrects her, leaving no room for argument; though again she rolls her eyes at him, she makes no further attempt to correct him. She’ll probably make up for it by force-feeding him breakfast the next morning, but he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.

“Drive safely,” he adds, and she throws him a salute. Then she’s down the hall and out the door, and he’s resetting the alarm and the locks.

For a long minute, he hesitates by the desk, warring unsuccessfully with the belief that he has a responsibility to at least attempt the paperwork again that night. A cup of tea, a novel he’s been too long in reading, and the possibility of actual sleep provide a far more tempting counteroffer, and at last he switches off the lights and makes his way down the hall, silent as a cat. Tomorrow will, if the pattern of the last fifteen years holds, offer a new set of lives ended too soon and additional, unnecessary examples of human depravity; for now, though, the ghosts are as silent as the rest of his home, and he’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Grief assessments will hold another eight hours.


End file.
